realizes how it is that all creation groaneth and travaileth together in spirit until now. So also, though perhaps more rarely, with the influence of exalted and lost Friendship. But Wordsworth, happily for himself, seems to have met with no such accident of revolution. Passing through the world as a pilgrim, pure-minded, and even sad with the sense of the mysterious future, nothing occurred in his little journey to strike him down as a dead man, and agonize him into a full knowledge of the whole mystery of the present. Hence, as we believe, the want of that intensity in his poetry which we find in the writings, not only of the so-called subjective poets, such as Byron and Dante, but also of the greatest objective poets, as Goethe and Shakespeare. The ink of Wordsworth is never his own blood.

It is little more than an extension of the preceding remark, to say that Wordsworth was rather a poet or bard than (if we may be allowed such a distinction) a lyrist or minstrel. The purpose of the poet, using the term for the moment in this restricted sense, is simply to describe, narrate, or represent some portion of the external, as it is rounded out and made significant in his own mind; the purpose of the lyrist or minstrel is to pour forth the passing emotions of his soul, and inflame other men with the fire that consumes himself. Accordingly, the faculties most special to the merely poetic exercise, as in the old Homeric epos or in modern descriptive verse, are those of intellect, sensibility, and imagination— passion or personal excitement being but a separate ingredient which may be more or less present according to circumstances, and which ought, as some think, to be absent from pure poetry altogether: whereas, in lyrical effusion, on the other hand, passion or present excitement is nearly all in all. The poetry of Keats may be taken as a specimen of pure poetry as such: all his chief poems are literally compositions or creations, the results of a process by which the poet's mind, having projected itself into an entirely imaginary element, as devoid as possible of all connexion with or similarity to the present, worked and moved therein slowly and fantastically at its own will and pleasure. As specimens, again, of the

purely lyrical, we have all such pieces, ancient and modern, as are properly denominated psalms, odes, hymns, or songs. When, therefore, people talk, as they now incessantly do, of calmness as being essential to the poet; and when, with Wordsworth, they define the poetic art to consist in the tranquil recollection of bygone emotion, it is clear that they can have in view only pure poetry, the end of which, as we have said, is to represent in an imaginative manner some portion of the outward. For, of the lyrist or song-writer we would affirm, precisely as we would affirm of his near kinsman, the orator, that the more of passion or personal impetus he has the better; and so far from advising him to wait for complete tranquillity, we would advise him to select as the true lyrical moment, that first moment, whenever it is, when the primary perturbation of his soul has just so far subsided that his trembling hands can sweep the strings. But along with this difference comes another. The poet, in describing his scene or narrating his story, feels himself impelled to every legitimate mode of increasing the pleasure he conveys; and the result, in one direction, is Metre. But however natural Metre may have been in its origin, it has now become to the poet rather a pre-established arrangement or available set of conditions to the rule of which, voluntarily and guided by his instinct for harmony, he adapts what he has already in other respects rendered complete, than a compulsory suggestion of the poetic act itself careful for its own accoutrement. Not so, however, with the lyrist. As cadence or musical utterance is natural in an excited state of the feelings, so in lyrical poetry ought the song or melody to be more than the words. The heart of the lyrist should be a perpetual fountain of song; and when he is to hold direct communication with the world, an inarticulate hum or murmur, rising, as it were, from the depths of his being, ought to precede and necessitate all his actual speech. Now in this lyrical capability, this love of sound or cadence for its own sake, (in which, by the bye, we have remarked that the Scotch generally excel the English,) Wordsworth is certainly inferior to many other poets. One might have inferred as much from the narrowness of his

theory of verse; but the fact is rendered still more apparent by a perusal of his poetical compositions themselves. Very few poets, we think, have been more admirable masters of poetic metre: no versification that we know is more rich, various, and flexible, or more soothing to the ear than that of Wordsworth. But he is not a singer or a minstrel properly so called; the lyric madness does not seize him; verse with him is rather an exquisite variety of rhetoric, a legitimate æsthetic device, than a necessary form of utterance. We do not think that in all Wordsworth there is a single stanza after reading which and quite losing sight of the words, we are still haunted (as we constantly are in Burns, Byron, and Tennyson) by an obstinate recollection of the tune. Were we required to say in what particular portion of Wordsworth's poetry he has shown most of this true lyric spirit, in which we believe him to have been on the whole deficient, we should unhesitatingly mention his Sonnets. These are among the finest and most sonorous things in our language; and it is by them, in connexion with his large poem The Excursion, or as we may now say, The Recluse, that his great reputation will be most. surely perpetuated.

SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH

LITERATURE.*

IT was in the winter of 1786-87 that the poet Burns, a new prospect having been suddenly opened up to him by the kind intervention of Blacklock, and a few other influential men in Edinburgh, abandoned his desperate project of emigrating to the West Indies, and hastened to pay his first and memorable visit to the Scottish metropolis. During that winter, as all who are acquainted with his life know, the Ayrshire ploughman, then in his twenty-ninth year, was the lion of Edinburgh society. Lord Monboddo, Dugald Stewart, Harry Erskine, Dr. Robertson, Dr. Hugh Blair, Henry Mackenzie, Dr. Gregory, Dr. Black, Dr. Adam Ferguson-such were the names then most conspicuous in the literary capital of North Britain; and it was in the company of these men, alternated with that of the Creeches, the Smellies, the Willie Nicols, and other contemporary Edinburgh celebrities of a lower grade, that Burns first realized the fact that he was no mere bard of local note, but a new power and magnate in Scottish literature.

To those who are alive to the poetry of coincidences, two anecdotes connected with this residence of Burns in Edinburgh will always be interesting. What reader of Lockhart's Life of Scott is there who does not remember the account there given of Scott's first and only interview with Burns? As the story is now more minutely told in Mr. Robert Chambers's. Life of Burns, Scott, who was then a lad of sixteen, just

* NORTH BRITISH REVIEW: August, 1852.-Life of Lord Jeffrey; with a Selection from his Correspondence. By LORD COCKBURN, one of the Judges of the 2 vols. 1852. [What is here printed is only Court of Session in Scotland. the introductory part of the article as it stood in the Review.]

removed from the High School to a desk in his father's office, was invited by his friend and companion, the son of Dr. Ferguson, to accompany him to his father's house on an evening when Burns was to be there. The two youngsters entered the room, sat down unnoticed by their seniors, and looked on and listened in modest silence. Burns, when he came in, seemed a little out of his element, and, instead of mingling at once with the company, kept going about the room, looking at the pictures on the walls. One print particularly arrested his attention. It represented a soldier lying dead among the snow, his dog on one side, and a woman with a child in her arms on the other. Underneath the print were some lines of verse descriptive of the subject, which Burns read aloud with a voice faltering with emotion. A little while after, turning to the company and pointing to the print, he asked if any one could tell him who was the author of the lines. No one chanced to know, excepting Scott, who remembered that they were from an obscure poem of Langhorne's. The information, whispered by Scott to some one near, was repeated to Burns, who, after asking a little more about the matter, rewarded his young informant with a look of kindly interest, and the words, (Sir Adam Ferguson reports them,) "You'll be a man yet, sir." Such is the one story, the story of the "literary ordination," as Mr. Chambers well calls it, of Scott by Burns-a scene which we think Sir William Allan would have delighted to paint. The other story, we believe, is now told for the first time by Lord Cockburn. Somewhere about the very day on which the foregoing incident happened, 66 a little black creature' of a boy, we are told, who was going up the High Street of Edinburgh, and staring diligently about him, was attracted by the appearance of a man whom he saw standing on the pavement. He was taking a good and leisurely view of the object of his curiosity, when some one standing at a shop-door tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Ay, laddie, ye may weel look at that man! that's Robert Burns." The "little black creature," thus early addicted to criticism, was Francis Jeffrey, the junior of Scott by two years, and exactly four years behind him in the